Neck Pocket

I wanted to make some progress on the neck. In the past I've finished the necks and bodies more completely before worrying about joining them, but given that this neck joint is a little harder than a typical Fender bolt on, I want to get that joint finalised as soon as possible.

First, while the neck is still slab shaped, I took the opportunity to place the fretboard in its final position. It's much easier now, rather than when the neck is shaped, since at the minute we have a straight edge that is parallel to the centre line - this feature is lost once the neck's taper is put on. That allows one to measure quite easily from the edge, and mark lines square to the centre line to help position the fretboard using the fret slots.

I drilled little holes through a couple of fret slots to place pins into the neck:

And I did similar into the neck template that I'll use later:

Again - a couple of pins through the template into the mahogany will locate it into the correct place later:

Then I started to shape the neck. A number of the jigs I'll be using in the next couple of stages rely on having one straight edge, so I'll leave one side (on the right in the picture below) straight and parallel to the centre line. I hack a chunk off the other side:

And start to mount it into my heel shaping jig. The MDF base of this jig has the shape of the neck heel in it. The neck block is be clamped on top of this, and the whole thing run against the robo sander as we've seen before. The robo sander will use the MDF as it's template, running it's bearing against it and shaping the mahogany as it goes.

The neck is clamped thus:

And I check that it is exactly square against the MDF base (it is):

We can see here the material that needs to be removed - the robo sander bearing will run against the MDF shape, and remove all the overhanging mahogany.

In fact, that's too much material for the robo sander to remove - it would take forever. I mark it out...

...and hack large chunks off using my bandsaw. This looks awful - a result of that cut being about at the limit of the thickness that my bandsaw can handle :)

However, once it's back in the jig, we can see that there's now significantly less overhang - so less material to remove:

This picture shows the jig in place, with the robo sander running against the mahogany:

And here's the heel half way through the process - you can see that the shape of the mahogany is approaching the jig shape:

And here's the neck finished, out of the jig. The bit on the right wasn't shaped due to it being too tall for the robo sander to reach. It will be cut off at a later stage:

I wanted to cut the tenon into the neck, but hadn't yet routed out the neck pocket. This was naturally the next thing to do. The neck plane on top of the body had already been carved at four degrees on the body. We can therefore mount a template to that plane and know that the base of the neck pocket will also be at four degrees. If the base of the neck pocket is at four degrees, then the neck will be at four degrees too :]

 From the side you can see the angle of the template:

As with the body chambering, I hog out a load of material using forstner bits before routing:

Like so,

Finally yielding:

The router simply runs on the template, using a follower bearing bit like so:

Eventually yielding this neck pocket:

Which, once the template is removed, looks pretty good:

Next up, I'd like to cut the tenon into the neck.I'm keen to get that in place before spending too much more time on the body shaping and neck / fretboard. 

It's a tricky joint which I've not done before. At at the minute I could get it wrong and throw away the neck without too much regret spend. Had I glued on the fretboard,shaped and bound the neck and so on, then it would be a bigger waste.